Join us on the plaza at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art on Monday, August 21 for Eclipse 2017!

Bring your lawn chair to the plaza beginning at 11:30 a.m. and enjoy this once in a life time experience with fellow eclipse watchers until 2:30 p.m. The 94 percent solar eclipse is expected to be viewed in Memphis at 1:22 p.m.

Get here early to claim your free eclipse glasses, while supplies last.

Long before there were cameras or telescopes, eclipse watchers recorded what they saw in the sky in words, drawings, and paintings. Create your own picture of the solar eclipse with chalk and paper on the Brooks plaza!

NOTE: The museum building will not be open during the event.

Order your Memphis Eclipse T-shirt online and pick it up from WMC Action News 5's Kontji Anthony at the museum Saturday, Sunday or Monday during the event. 15% of the proceeds will go to Brooks and $1 for every T-shirt will benefit Memphis Animal Services!

$9/$5 Brooks members and students with valid id/Free with VIP Film Pass.

Lloyd Binford hated all adulterers, but he reserved particular revulsion for actress Ingrid Bergman after she left her doctor husband, Petter Lindstrom, for film director Roberto Rossellini. The love affair between the actress who’d portrayed both a nun and a virgin saint (in 1945’s The Bells of St Mary’s and 1948’s Joan of Arc, respectively) and the Italian neorealist director caused an enormous scandal which resulted in the denouncement of Bergman on the floor of the US Senate. In Feburary 1950, the same month that Stromboli was released, Bergman gave birth to Rossellini’s son. And soon after, according to Michael Finger’s 2008 “Banned in Memphis” cover story for the Memphis Flyer, Binford refused to permit “the public exhibition of a motion picture starring a woman who is universally known to be living in open and notorious adultery.” The critic, legend has it, deemed Stromboli “sadistic, unmoral and immoral.”

Fittingly, then, the first collaboration between Rossellini and Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis. Set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island, Stromboli features Bergman in the lead role as Karin, a post-WWII Lithuanian refugee who marries a simple fisherman she met in a prisoner of war camp. Cut off from the outside world in his isolated village on an island off the Sicilian coast, Karin finds herself crumbling emotionally even as she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Balancing the director’s trademark neorealism—exemplified here in a remarkable depiction of the fishermen’s lives and work—with deeply felt melodrama, Stromboli is a revelation. Today, it is recognized as one of the greatest films of all time.

Author and columnist Richard Alley will introduce Stromboli and lead a short discussion after the screening.

Director: Roberto Rossellini | Italy | 1950 | 107 minutes

$9/$5 Brooks members and students with valid id/Free with VIP Film Pass.

Tickets are available online until 2:30 pm the day of the screening or 2:30 pm on Friday for weekend matinees. Tickets are also available at Visitor Services, or by calling 901.544.6208 during regular business hours. Unsold tickets are also available in the rotunda immediately preceding a screening.

Banned in Memphis is an ongoing series of film screenings highlighting work banned from Memphis theaters by Lloyd Binford, the head of the Memphis Censor Board for 28 years. Regarded as “the toughest critic in America,” the former railway clerk turned insurance executive was notorious for his views on white supremacy, womanhood, and outsider views of the American South. Binford banned films with African American stars or unsegregated scenes, films that featured violence or teenage rebellion, and even film that he disliked because of the personal conduct of the actors rather than the content of the script.

Interested in learning more about the profession and practice of art therapy?

Join us for an informative session led by the Brooks’ Art Therapy Access Program art therapist, Paige Scheinberg, MS, ATR, who will introduce you to the history, treatment goals, unique benefits, and settings in which you may find and/or utilize an art therapist. Participants interested in becoming an art therapist will also learn about the education and training needed to become a credentialed art therapist.

As the books in his exhibition, By the Book: A Tribute to Dolph Smith, cannot be opened and fully experienced, artist Dolph Smith will bring in other examples to demonstrate the various techniques and format he employs.

Join us for this free, special membership event at 2 p.m. on Sunday, September 10.

Dr. Ari Eisenberg, Rhodes College Assistant Professor of History, will lead a discussion on “Portraying ‘The Other’: Gender, Race and Representation in American Art” for the first Café Conversation in September.

Dr. Eisenberg’s tour will define who “The Other” is and how they are portrayed in art by examining select works in the museum’s American and contemporary galleries, followed by a 45-minute conversation in Café Brooks.

Café Conversations is a pilot project that explores art and social justice issues through candid discussions inside Café Brooks by Paradox.

The conversations will occur the third Wednesday of every month and will coincide with a tour of a related special exhibition or works from the permanent collection. Led by local Memphians, the series will encourage visitors to contemplate real life issues by drawing comparisons to themes in art.

The Brooks membership is invited to join Stanton Thomas, Ph.D., for a Carroll Cloar-themed bicycle ride through Crittenden County, Arkansas. The easy, flat, 6-mile ride across the Delta leaves the Crittenden County Museum in Earle at 10 a.m.

You’ll see Rev. George Washington's funeral monument—that is, the famous “Angel in the Field,” as well as Gibson Bayou Church, The Earle Depot, and other sites immortalized in Cloar's work—as well as the endless, fecund fields and enormous skies of his paintings. Please meet at the Crittenden County Museum, 1112 Main Street, Earle, AR.

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The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art enriches the lives of our diverse community through the Museum's expanding collection, varied exhibitions, and dynamic programs that reflect the art of world cultures from antiquity to the present.